A Salvage Job, Part One

America 1968. Everything was up for grabs. All passion and creativity seemed to gush from the counterculture. "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/But to be young was very heaven." I was young, 18, and enrolled as an undergraduate in the fourth year of the great experimental campus of the University of California at Santa Cruz. The spirit of the 60s was everywhere, in our music and our politics. and our firm belief that the Establishment promoting the war in Vietnam and threatening us with the coercion of the draft was so wrongheaded that it would have to collapse in its own excrement.

Out of this oppositional stew of radical politics, how did I, a thoroughly assimilated Jew with an identity I could barely point to, end up in a slide towards Israel? In this first part of "A Salvage Job," you will meet the barefooted young man dancing the hora in the picture above. It's his fault. 

Host Info
Hosted by Dr. Robert Philipson
Robert is a former professor of African-American studies with a passion for jazz and art. A published author and Harlem Renaissance historian, he has produced multiple films about the intersectionality of race, music, and sexuality.

Music

"Am Yisrael Chai" - Eyal Golan

"Hinei Ma Tov" - Canto Hebraico

“For What It’s Worth” - Buffalo Springfield 

"Hatikvah(התקווה) Across the Globe - Acapella Israeli Anthem for Hope" - Various Artists

"Am Yisrael Chai" - Shlomo Carlebach

“Mama Told Me (Not To Come)” - Three Dog Night

“The End” - The Beatles

"Where is Love" - Acapella Arrangement from Oliver!

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Transcript

I had never lived alone before. This was the unexpected consequence of my decision to take advantage of the University of California’s intervisitation program and spend the spring quarter of my senior year at Berkeley. At that time students of any UC campus could spend one quarter taking classes at another. I loved my time at UC Santa Cruz, but I wanted to experience Berkeley as a “great university,” on par with the Ivy League, and the town as a nodal point for the counterculture and radical politics.

I knew nobody and would live in Berkeley for only ten weeks. Staying in the dorms was not an option. I combed the local paper for an available rental and chose something relatively cheap two blocks from campus. When I went to look at what had been advertised as a “furnished efficiency apartment,” I found an unfinished basement with a bed, a desk, a table, a small fridge, and a hot plate. I also noted that the two small windows below ground level provided very little light but didn’t realize that I would need to have an interior lamp on at all times. There was, of course, no bathroom. I would have to share one with the occupants of the house upstairs. I did have a private entrance, although coming into my underground lair required a bent posture to avoid hitting the pipe traversing its interior. This was far and away the worst of the few places I looked at, but the others were out of my price range, and so I took it. At least there was a narrow backyard in which I could read, and the spring days in Berkeley were warm. 

What I didn’t take into account was that my minimalist existence would only exacerbate my loneliness. I hadn’t considered the consequences of being away from friends and acquaintances, hadn’t realized how much my social needs were met by the casual company of housemates, classmates, and simply mates. In Berkeley I had to fill those needs with solitary activities. There were plenty to choose from. The university provided a myriad of cultural offerings: plays, concerts, lectures, and movies. The university art museum had its own film annex, and I watched a week’s worth of Eisenstein films there.

The intellectual content of my undergraduate English classes was excellent (one of my professors was the not yet famous Renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt), but the classes were large and provided little opportunity for quick friendships. As for developing relations with the professors—a common occurrence at Santa Cruz—that was out of the question. They were busy or uninterested or both. 

As for the counterculture, my illegal unit was only two blocks east of Telegraph Avenue, providing all I could ask for—and then some. On the final blocks before the avenue ended at the campus flowed a constant bazaar of students, tourists, sidewalk musicians, hippies, God freaks, gurus, and crazies shouting about Jesus. Street vendors sold tie-dyes, leatherwork, lamps, body painting, horoscopes, tarot readings, houseplants, pretzels, and buttons declaring “J. Edgar Is Listening to You.” The bookstores, Moe’s and Shakespeare & Co., were legendary as were the record shops. The Caffè Med proved the best place to overhear arguments between white radicals and Black power advocates, hippies debating the relative merits of the teachings of Meher Baba and Eckenkar, activists planning the next protest or ranting about the latest political outrage, and ancillary nuggets of cultural insight. “No, man, if you play ‘Revolution 9’ backward, you can clearly hear ‘turn me on, dead man.’ They’re talking about Paul!” The smaller shops offered a cornucopia of T-shirts, campus gear, watches, posters of psychedelic art and classic movies, and exotic foods for the era, such as gyros and crêpes. The awning of the  Shambhala Bookstore proclaimed All Hail to the Cosmic Mind. There were regular businesses as well—a shoe store, a laundromat, a drugstore—but the Bank of America looked like a fortress after having its windows repeatedly smashed in student riots, and in front of the badly misnamed Garden Spot Market a knot of street people persistently bummed change from the passersby. It was not uncommon to see a street vendor of dubious hygiene ply his trade in front of a wall on which Fuck Capitalism had been painted. Those five blocks of Telegraph provided all the stimulation of St. Mark’s Place in New York or the Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, but once my touristic appetites had been sated, I found it best to take the avenue in small doses. In the end because of the hassling from the spare-change freaks and the street people camped on the sidewalk, I found other ways of getting to school.

Although the year was 1971, the sixties were far from over, and in the spring a young man’s fancy turned to thoughts of smashing the state. A year before, I had spent the entire month of May heading the Strike Library Research Committee during UCSC’s extended protest against the expansion of the war into Cambodia. Two years before, May witnessed the government-sanctioned destruction of People’s Park in Berkeley, sparking the largest, most violent riots in the city’s history. One bystander was killed by police gunfire, another blinded and two hundred protesters seriously wounded. I myself had come to Berkeley to participate in a protest march after the riots had been quelled, and we filed by the fenced off land in the thousands, marching in sympathy with a community that had turned the long fallow university land into a park, marching against the tear-gas and billy-club techniques the pigs had used to beat the demonstrators down, marching against the war, President Nixon, and Governor Reagan. (“If it takes a bloodbath,” our governor said, “let’s get it over with.”) The atmosphere of the march was eerily quiet. Flanking the ruined park, a barbed-wire barrier guarded two tanks and a line of National Guardsmen standing grim faced and unhappy. Tanks! The fucking state militia called out against the citizens of the state! One of my long-haired friends slid a daisy down the barrel of a rifle pointed our way. Everybody was tense, fearing the spark that would unleash more bloodshed. Overhead a plane trailed a banner that read “Let a Thousand Parks Bloom.”

By the spring of 1971, the war at home had only escalated. We were infuriated that so much of America had swallowed Nixon’s lies, but many of our own demonstrations had turned violent. I had been a college student for three years, and each year on the political front had been worse than the last. Everybody I knew was against the war, hated Reagan, loathed Nixon. When flyers stapled to trees announced a demonstration on Telegraph Avenue to commemorate May 15, the two-year anniversary of Bloody Thursday, it was in the order of things, and so I went. 

It was a gorgeous spring day for a protest. The green hills of Berkeley rose up shaggily against a sky of unbroken blue. Arriving on Telegraph, I was surprised at what greeted me—or rather what didn’t. The avenue looked unnaturally deserted in the yellow light of the morning. If there had been a demonstration it had long been dispersed. Closed shops and empty sidewalks lined a street devoid of traffic. Some windows had been smashed; some litter baskets overturned. A few longhairs darted in and out of the side streets. A mist of white gas hung in the air a few blocks from where I stood. All was quiet around me, but I heard shouts in the distance.

Fascinated, I began walking toward the university. As I reached the middle of the block, a crowd of young people rounded the corner with a police car in pursuit. They were clearly panicked. “The pigs are pepper-gasing!” one of them shouted, and my stomach convulsed. I too turned around and started racing toward a side street, but the cop car violently accelerated and shot sharp puffs of gas on either side. Once the block was covered, the cops sped off to gas another group. I hit the side street at full tilt but stopped as soon as I was off the avenue. My eyes were stinging furiously. My nostrils burned too, and my lungs felt as if splintered boards had scraped them. A woman was crying and coughing behind me, but I couldn’t see through the tearing and pain. Nauseated, I half crouched against a wall, willing myself to keep my hands from my eyes. The burning grew less intense but seemed to sink deeper into my sockets. I blinked furiously. The crying woman stumbled past, supported by a young man with a goatee and long brown hair. He turned and said, “You better get out of here. Those fuckers’ll be coming back.” He was holding the woman’s hands away from her eyes, guiding her along. “I wish we’d never come,” she sobbed. “We never should have come.”

I stayed against the wall for a while, then slowly made my way to my basement. I wanted to go elsewhere but knew no one in the area. Besides, I needed to treat my eyes. Upon returning, I soaked a washrag in a vinegar and water solution recommended by the Berkeley Barb, lay on my bed and dabbed my eyes. For a long time, I lay still. Slowly the queasiness dissipated, the stinging subsided. My thoughts and emotions whirled in a stew of creativity. Why was I thinking of that? But I had to get it down on paper; I had to get it out. I arose, scrolled a fresh sheet of paper into my portable typewriter and pressed the keys to my first story.

A mental snag, an irrational direction of interest, some unexplained pull—psychological, chemical, who knew? From the first Sam had felt a shadowy sense of significance in the person of Daniel Silverstein, only an incipient attraction, barely enough for Sam to mark his presence. He had felt similarly towards other people, now forgotten. A friendship had rarely ensued. Close communication usually jeopardized the ethereal quality–so attractive in itself–of the relationship, or almost-relationship. The reality rarely matched the expectation.

But there was nothing ethereal about Daniel. He moved with a heavy tread and seemed to be everywhere in that small college community. His features were also heavy, thick and middle European with the nose and full lips and tightly massed black hair. You didn’t need the last name to peg him as Jewish. Daniel was super-Jewish. As a student leader at Hillel, he organized lectures on Jewish topics and large-scale celebrations of the High Holidays. Sam guessed that he was a pre-med student from the L.A. area well before he found out that he was one of the few L.A. Jews who hadn’t known of Daniel Silverstein, a tsadik in the making, for years beforehand. It was the natural result of a whole series of avoidance pattern.His parents shunned temple society (too inbred, his mother claimed) and were the only Jews in a neighborhood of Gentiles (goyim, his mother called them). Sam himself had never joined a debating club or the Young Democrats in which the name of Daniel Silverstein would have become as familiar to him as to all the bright college-bound Jews of the Golden West.

Samuel’s interests were more literary, classical even. He preferred Sophocles to Jeremiah but felt, at bottom, that it was the same spirit motivating both: a lacerated sense of Presence. He longed for the reverence of antiquity, but among the freaks and fads of California that yearning had turned inward, promoting both an elitist embrace of High Culture and a sarcastic deprecation of all the things his upbringing prevented him from believing.

This last paragraph was, in all frankness, bullshit. I was not the tormented truth-seeker I made my literary persona out to be. I was as confused as any sheltered young man might be living away from home for the first time. I had passed through my share of adolescent doubts and miseries, but I was not spiritually precocious, no Teufelsdröckh or Isaiah in a world without God. God was sometimes invoked as an implausible hypothesis in our jejune discussions on the Meaning of Life; I had roomed one chaotic quarter with a disturbed young man who spent his time trying to convince other people that he was God; but for the most part my college peers concerned themselves with the social and political challenges of the sixties: racism, the war, and the nurturing of Consciousness III. During my freshman year alone, we shocked the regents of the University of California with noisy demonstrations when they held their annual meeting on our campus, occupied the administration building in a sympathy protest against the destruction of People’s Park, forced our on-campus dining halls to boycott grapes as the United Farm Workers had instructed, organized fasts to send money to Biafra, agitated for a Black school on campus to be named Malcolm X College, and participated wholeheartedly in a campaign to stop a housing development planned for the coastline just north of the city limits. And in between all this we found time to protest against the dorm rules for intervisitation between the sexes (the tattered remnants of in loco parentis) and flout the ban on pets and alcohol.

It wasn’t all politics. Timothy Leary came to campus and preached the gospel of psychedelia to free our minds. Disciples of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi promised bliss through breathing techniques. The campus ministers sported peace signs around their necks, and Jesus freaks made their maiden appearance on downtown’s Pacific Avenue. One of the first women I was attracted to was a follower of Meher Baba, a self-proclaimed Avatar of God who had kept a vow of silence for over forty years. When he died that January, she dropped out of school and went to India. Then there were the dabblings in magic and Satanism that appealed to the more spaced-out elements of the subculture. One stoned night four of us sat in a dorm room lit only by a candle, concentrating on a coin to levitate it into the air. And the Ouija board never failed to discomfit us with its oracular pronouncements.

So the activities of Daniel (whose last name was not Silverstein), while highlighting him as a Jew, took place in a kaleidoscopic round of social and political commitments. I was drawn to Daniel because he was an attractive guy—committed, quick-witted, humorous—but the Judaism he promoted was of no interest to me. In our small college community, the opening year of Merrill College, we were bound to meet sooner or later, and it turned out to be sooner—the end of my first quarter. Daniel had come into the college as a junior—two years ahead of me. The last days of the quarter were always a time of serious partying. The pressure was off after the final exams; three weeks of freedom stretched deliciously ahead. Dorm living was frenetic in general—two hundred young adults crammed into one building—so the parties sometimes got wild. There might have been regulations about drinking liquor on campus, but I don’t remember a case of enforcement.

Sam could hear the babble of the party as he walked towards the dormitory entrance. He looked up to see bulked-out shadows on the top-floor balcony, and a stereo blasted out into the night:

Please allow me to introduce myself

I’m a man of wealth and taste

He passed the entrance column where “Mao Tse-tung House” had been spray-painted above the brass letters spelling out the name of Copernicus, stepped into an elevator smelling of carpet rot and laundry soap, and pushed the button for the fourth floor. The party was being hosted by “the Headland Heights,” as the inhabitants of the top floor called it. Daniel was their Resident Assistant, acting as a nominal shepherd for the administration, and he quickly developed an affectionate, teasing relationship with his students. They had blasted his room one night with a recording of a train screeching its way through a tunnel while he was in bed with a girlfriend, and he came back from Thanksgiving to find his room buried in two feet of Styrofoam packing material. One joke he did not appreciate was a wall painting of Superman bounding into the air with skullcap, prayer shawl, and elongated nose. That he had made them paint over. They apologized, and the incident was relegated to the past.

When the elevator doors groaned open, Sam stepped into a lounge that couldn’t decide whether it was a passageway or a public area. To create more space, all furniture had been moved out except for a long table, sticky with wine and plastic cups, and a homely brown television resting on tw clay feet. The feet had been fashioned as a stand by the same student who had painted the Jewish Superman. One of the walls featured a black-line reproduction of an Aubrey Beardsley lady. On the opposite wall were taped a red and black poster of Che Guevara and one of the rock group Santana. On the final portion of the wall, just left of the television set, a quotation from Eugene V. Debs had been lettered:

While there is a lower class

I am in it

While there is a criminal element

I am of it

While there is one soul in jail

I am not free.

The third wall, across from the elevator, was of plate glass. A sliding door led out to the narrow balcony.

The lounge was dark and filled with people. The party spilled along the hall and into the various rooms where students talked, passed joints, and lay sprawled out on the floor. A small knot of people danced to the Rolling Stones illuminated only by the glare of the muted television that nobody was watching. Sam caught glimpses of black-and-white G.I.’s making their way across a pitted, over-exposed field. Occasional puffs of smoke appeared beside them. A modish young newsman appeared for a minute followed by an ad for plastic sandwich wrap.

Sam made his way through the dancers, found a half-empty wine cup on the sticky table, and began to wind towards the bathroom in order to wash it out. As he passed one of the open doors he saw Daniel Silverstein sitting on a mattress gesticulating to a few of the campus radicals reclining against the opposite wall. Wine cups stood about the room. Sam resolved to join the discussion after pouring himself a drink.

He entered the bathroom to find a young man crumpled against one of the toilet bowls. “Need some help?” Sam inquired. The boy shook his head. There was a peace symbol sewn onto the back pocket of his jeans.

“Tequila,” he explained weakly.

“With wine?”

“Uh huh.”

Dumb! Sam thought. Aloud he said, “Well, I hope you get over it soon, brother.” He turned to the sink and began washing his cup. The bathroom was large, institutional, white and sterile. Above the row of mirrors someone had scrawled GOD IS LOVE and below that, in another hand, GOD IS CUM. Behind him Sam heard the sound of retching.

I find my authorial heavy hand embarrassing—a television set on feet of clay?—and I’ve struggled whether or not to excise the more sophomoric passages. God knows the story received its share of critiques. “I find your dogged, serious style inefficient and distracting,” one writing instructor penned. I had no idea what he was talking about. Was it even a story or was it therapy? The events it described had occurred some two years before its composition, and its composition was not a considered work of art. As a considered work of art, I’d have to throw the whole thing out. But the events revivified as I wrote them down, the conversations somewhat touched up but essentially reported in their context. I see it now as a chronicle. I have spared you the original title and requisite epigraph (Luke 13:34) that denotes Serious Literature. I won’t say I haven’t smoothed a sentence here and there, but warts and all, chaverim, it has some value.

Sam entered Daniel’s room to find him still in discussion with one of the leaders of the Santa Cruz Radical Union, known familiarly as SCRU, a large, blond student named Tom Applewhite. It was the name, perhaps, that had driven him to embrace a Maoist version of Communism that Sam, as a layperson, had never desired to understand. Daniel’s room, a single, was small and scrupulously neat except for the superficial spill of wine cups and ashtrays. The walls were adorned with a large map of Israel and Chagall’s aerial fantasies of the shtetl. The bookshelf was tightly packed and auxiliary piles stood on the desk. Before a darkened window a bamboo wind chime hung. The mattress had been placed directly on the floor to give the room a greater sense of space, and Daniel was settled on its India-print covering, his back against the wall. Tom sat across from him taking occasional sips from a wine cup. Sam turned the desk chair around and created the apex of an imaginary isosceles triangle at the mattress’s far end.

“You just can’t accept the simple facts of history,” the blond-haired boy was saying. “The Israeli state is a creation of the West, an enclave of capitalist expansion in the Middle East. The Jews are tools of American imperialism.”

“I can’t buy that,” Daniel replied. “The Jews chose Israel and will die for Israel as Israel, not as an enclave of capitalist expansion.”

“I’m not saying the Israelis don’t believe in what they’re doing,” Applewhite returned, “but they’re not the ones who call the shots. They couldn’t even exist as a nation if it weren’t for all the aid we give them.”

“Well, the Arabs couldn’t threaten their existence if it weren’t for all the weapons the Russians give them.”

“And that’s just my point!” Applewhite exclaimed, seeing his way to rhetorical victory. “The struggle in the Middle East isn’t really between the Arabs and the Jews. It’s between the Russians and Americans.”

Daniel lifted his chin as he made his reply. “Look, I won’t deny that the fire is being fueled from the outside, but the Jews are fighting for something more than an ideology. They’re fighting for their right to exist. We’ve always had to fight for our right to exist.”

“Now you’re calling in the old emotional arguments,” Applewhite remonstrated. “You can’t work that trick here in America. The Jews have it better than anybody else.”

“My parents wouldn’t agree with you there,” Daniel replied. “They grew up in this country, and they’re still not convinced that what happened in Germany couldn’t happen here.”

“You can’t run off that old concentration-camp guilt forever!”

“My God, man! Six million Jews were wiped out! How much guilt will it take to neutralize that?”

“It’s always the same with you. Every time somebody starts to criticize, you drag in the Six Million. You can’t browbeat everybody into silence that way. It doesn’t have anything to do with the situation in the Middle East.”

“It has everything to do with the situation in the Middle East! Why do you think the Jews so desperately want a place of their own? For 2000 years we tried to settle in other lands and everywhere we were persecuted, killed, run out or turned into an underclass. Why shouldn’t we have a land of our own when other nations despise us and hunt us down?”

“If you really feel that way,” Sam interjected to his surprise, “why don’t you go to Israel yourself? I’m Jewish too, but that doesn’t mean I support Israel in everything she does. The radicals have a point. Israel has displaced thousands of Palestinians; Israel is a militaristic state; Israel has expanded consistently since its creation in 1948.”

Daniel, who had been arguing exclusively with Applewhite, looked at Sam in surprise, then shifted his position to include the boy in the discussion.

“First,” he said, “all the Arabs who left Israel in 1948 did so of their own accord, and those who did stay have a higher standard of living than the Arabs of the surrounding countries. Secondly, Israel is a militaristic society because it has to be. (“Bullshit!” Applewhite muttered.) When your enemies have sworn to drive you into the sea, you have no choice but to be prepared. Thirdly, Israel has expanded through wars that have always been started by the Arabs. If the Arabs had allowed Israel the right to exist from the beginning, it wouldn’t be half the size it is today.”

“Why should the Arabs grant Israel the right to exist?” Tom exploded. “They had the land taken away from them. The British muscled in and said, ‘Here, we’re going to give this to the Jews because we don’t want them in Europe anymore.’”

“That’s not very accurate,” Daniel replied, “but even so it points up the historical need for a Jewish homeland.”

“Why at the expense of the Arabs?” Applewhite retorted. “You had 2000 years in Europe. The Jews started settling in Palestine decades before Fascism. You can’t blame Hitler for Zionism! Why did you have to invade a Third World country?”

“That’s like asking a Black why he can’t be white,” Daniel smiled.

“It’s not the same thing at all!” Sam objected. “I think the Jews in America can assimilate. I am assimilated as a matter of fact, but that doesn’t solve the problem for the Jews in Europe or the Soviet Union. You can’t assimilate into a society that won’t accept you.”

“And as long as Jews are oppressed or threatened anywhere,” Daniel continued mildly, “we can’t forget our own identity either.”

“Well I’ll tell you,” Sam said, “there are plenty of minorities being oppressed and threatened right here at home. I don’t need to look to other countries to find that.”

“But you’ll always have a special feeling for the plight of the Jews in other parts of the world,” Daniel said. “You can’t deny your tie to Israel.”

“I jolly well can deny it,” Sam replied in irritation. “Being Jewish means practically nothing to me. I wasn’t even bar mitzvahed. I’ve been inside a synagogue maybe five times in my life. I don’t know ten words of Yiddish.”

“And the fact that six million Jews were systematically slaughtered only twenty-five years ago means nothing to you?”

“Of course it means something! It was a crime against humanity So was the genocide of the American Indians. So is the genocide of the Indians in Brazil and that’s happening right now. Of course it means something, but it happened before I was even born. It’s history to me.”

“It’s not history to the people walking around with numbers on their arms.”

“But it’s history to me! You asked whether it was important to me. Am I supposed to renounce my American citizenship because of something that happened before I was born?”

“Nobody’s asking you to renounce anything,” Daniel said placatingly. “As a matter of fact, I’m asking you to accept something, to accept your identity as a Jew.”

“What for?” Sam challenged.

“Because you were born a Jew.”

Applewhite snorted at this, but Sam felt his forehead flush. That simple observation had cleanly pierced his defenses, and this was recognized in the silence that followed. Daniel sat looking at Sam almost tenderly, and the boy felt a sudden rush of affection for the older man. His face was kind and laughing and, yes, the features were certainly Jewish. The boy no longer felt like arguing. “I’ll have to think about that,” he finally replied, and the discussion swerved back to the merits and morality of Israel’s existence.

And so commenced my indiscreet flirtation with my Jewish identity. The dim corridors of history (dim through ignorance) beckoned my soul with the promise of even higher idealisms than the ones that had brought me into the battle of my generation. There was no question of my believing in God, much less Jehovah. I was anatomically incapable of it. But I was a sucker for mystique and the Jewish one was a whopper.

I had grown up feeling secure in America. My most vivid encounter with antisemitism occurred on a school bus. My seatmate confided to me one day that Jews smelled. It was with great relish that I told him I was Jewish. I grew up with the knowledge that there were those who held negative ideas about me without knowing me, but my Jewish identity was so attenuated that the people who thought it was important enough to hate me for it seemed a little improbable and more than a little ridiculous.

Through my mother, however, through the world of her childhood and adolescence, I glimpsed a society for whom being Jewish was the great divide between Them and Us—and They were not to be trusted. Reflecting on the tangled ambivalence her Jewishness brought in train, my mother once wrote to me:

Early in the week was Rosh Hashana, which always makes me feel a bit guilty and a bit sad. Although I feel myself intensely Jewish, I cannot bring myself to practice the faith . . . why??? I grew up in an all-Jewish neighborhood and the older people took this High Holiday very seriously while I chafed at missing school, died from hunger as we fasted until the evening glut, and generally hated the whole thing. But somehow I must have held it in awe and wonder for I still do—imagine over 5000 years of steady faith—not that it saved anyone from a pogrom. No, you see, it won’t work. The cold intellectualism seems to come first. Or does it?

But Belonging had its positive aspects, and these were what impressed me most strongly.

I was impressed by the solidarity of the Jewish community in Brazil when my parents had sent me to visit a Jewish friend who lived in São Paulo. Common enemies make common bonds, and with the presence of the Argentinian Nazis so nearby, the Jews of Brazil never lost their adhesive paranoia. Everywhere I went I was welcomed as a brother from across the seas. I was impressed.

I was impressed by the simple grace of the Sabbath meal as celebrated in a traditional home: the candles, white tablecloth, and bruchas.

I was impressed by the memories of a Yom Kippur service my parents took me to as a child. The high blue synagogue stayed with me, the prayer shawls, the haunting Kol Nidre, the Torah scrolls sheathed in their gnostic coverlets, the mysteriousness of the Hebrew alphabet.

I was impressed by Moses, the Old Testament, tenth-century Spain, Shylock, Exodus, Einstein, Freud, and Marx.

I was impressed by the fact that no matter what a man’s achievements were, if he was Jewish that fact always came out.

So I was ready to consider Daniel’s suggestion that I accept my Jewish identity. And when it became known that I was potential convert to the Jews who still cared enough about being Jews to generate a community, the great membrane of Belonging enfolded me. 

If he had come to scoff at the performance of Shlomo Carlebach, the singing rabbi, Sam had certainly stayed to pray. The fat Hasid had an appetite for physical contact, especially with the girls, but when he took up his guitar and began to play, his eyes glowed with zealous fire. He sang his happiness in the faith, and the students who had come to listen were caught up. They swayed when the music was slow, danced in frenetic circles when it was fast. Sam lost himself in the ebb and flow. Shlomo played his audience like a master. At the climax of a song in which concentric circles of dancers had closed in upon themselves, everyone had finally knotted to the center, a mass of humanity swaying to the strums of the rabbi’s diminishing guitar. Finally, there was only silence in the darkened room . . . silence and the clot of humans waiting for release. The silence lengthened. It closed about the dancers like a charged transparent sack. Finally, it was pierced by a song, unaccompanied and tremulous. The song was of Black origin; the tentative voice belonged to Sam

Someone’s crying, Lord

Kumbaya

* * *

“Have you been smoking pot?”

“Goddammit, Mother. How can you even ask me that?”

“What else am I supposed to think when you spring this on me so suddenly?

“You could take me seriously!”

Mrs. Horn stared at her son. The disbelief in her blue eyes gave way to the first glimmerings of apprehension.

“Why in God’s name do you want to go to Israel?”

Precisely in God’s name, Sam thought to himself but resisted the trouble that giving into the word play would stir up. He shifted on his stool. He couldn’t see how he could give his reasons without opening himself up to his mother’s ridicule. The big family tabby jumped on the counter by which Sam was sitting, and the boy took him into his lap.

“I have a friend up at school,” he said. “He’s organizing a trip through the university to study the living conditions on a kibbutz.”

“Is he Jewish?”

Sam scratched the cat’s backside and sent it ecstatically arching in the air. He could not control the irritation his mother’s question aroused. “His last name is Silverstein,” he said. “You tell me.”

A short silence followed. “My son the rabbi,” Mrs. Horn said bitterly.

“Jesus Christ, Mom,” Sam exploded. “Most mothers would be glad their son was taking an interest in their heritage.”

“Sam,” Mrs. Horn pleaded, “when your father and I moved out to California we had no interest in getting involved with the Jewish community so you wouldn’t have to go through what we did.”

Sam pushed his hand through his black curly hair. “Well, you’ve done a splendid job! I’m an orthodox, dyed-in-the-wool agnostic.”

Mrs. Horn turned back to the stove and continued placing cloves in the scored fat of a ham. “What did you want, Sammy? To go to synagogue every Friday night, forced into Sunday school every weekend? Did you want to learn Hebrew for your bar mitzvah?”

Sam shook his head in exasperation. “You always talk about the negative aspects of the religion. There’s a lot of beauty in the traditions too. Daniel had me to a Sabbath dinner, and it felt . . . what’s the word I’m looking for? Consequential. There was ceremony, a sense of occasion, a feeling that that night was special and reserved for appreciation. Around here the only thing Friday night meant was that we could watch television later than usual.”

Stung, Mrs. Horn turned again to her son. “Sammy, that’s not fair! I lived with the traditions for eighteen years, and they were shackles. The Sabbath services were boring and the temple society, worse. I couldn’t wait to get away from it all. I swore I would never put my children thought that.”

“Fine,” Sam replied, “but you didn’t give up being Jewish, did you? The world was still divided between Jews and Gentiles. We knew that only the goyim ate lime Jello, decorated their houses with porcelain tchotchkes, and named their kids Candy and Terence.”

“I never said I gave up being Jewish. I’m just not religious, that’s all.”

“But what does that mean, Mother, to be Jewish and not religious? What does it mean?”

Mrs. Horn turned back to her ham. “I have to make dinner.”

“You haven’t answered the question, Mother.”

“Sam,” her voice was tired, “it’s been a long day, and it’s not over for me yet. I can’t answer your question now.”

“That’s just the point. You can’t answer my question. Only I can do that, for myself at least, and that’s why I want to go to Israel. To find out the answer, to find out what it means to me or what it might mean to me, or maybe it won’t mean anything at all, but I’ve got to find out for myself. Can’t you see that? Your answers can’t be my answers. I’ve got to find out for myself.”

The classic cry of the younger generation. But it was a different place to find the gap. Most of my peers had rejected the religion of their fathers whereas I was trying to rediscover mine. I don’t think, however, that my search was so out of accord with the times. A tremendous idealism filled the air, and all of us, it seemed, wanted to bring about a purification of existing conditions. The movement expressed itself in predominantly political forms, but the impulse shared some religious motivation. Most organized churches were doctrinally unable to tap into the wellspring of emotion that surged in such turbulence, but there were enough gurus and rock stars to act out our fantasies and formulate our creed. “And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.” All of us were yearning in our various ways for redemption from middle-class America. My path led me to Israel.